This week was very different from weeks in the past. That is because Kati, my mentor, was on vacation the whole week. It was a very relaxed week, because I had the freedom to choose which experiments I wanted to run and I could do everything on my own time. Yet it was also one of my busiest weeks because I wanted to run a lot of different tests. I was also not here on Friday, due to a family wedding, and so I needed to fit everything into four days.

This week was a big week because all of the interns had our mid-term presentations to give on Friday. That meant we had to bring together all of our current data, conclusions, and next steps, and format them into a five-minute presentation. It may seem like a simple task, but with all of the experiments and data I have already collected, it was a little daunting to try and sort through it all to find what was relevant. So, along with the tests I ran, I also spent the rest of my time doing just that.

This week I felt a lot more confident in threw me off a little bit, due to the holiday in the middle of the week. Before this point, I never thought I would confuse Wednesday with Sunday. But nonetheless, the work continued and the day off gave the bacteria an extra day to grow.

There was barely any down time this week. I was almost always up and about doing something, because my project really got going over the past few days. This made for a very fast week! If every week continues like this, the rest of the summer will be over in a blink of an eye.

As the only incoming sophomore, I am the youngin' of the group and that was pretty intimidating at first. But all of students and staff have been very welcoming, so it has been relatively painless so far. As a freshman, this opportunity became available to me when I was awarded into the Johnson Fellowship Program through Oregon State University. It basically means that I was chosen, along with 27 other freshmen out of our class, to receive a scholarship (graciously funded by the Johnsons) to pursue a summer research internship.

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